For a while I’d been running a podcast which was the audio of my YouTube videos, but because of a problem in wordpress’s API for file uploads, it’s just too much of a pain in the neck right now, so for the foreseeable future I’m not going to be uploading the podcast.
(I am planning to make posts which embed the YouTube video, which is far less work for me than extracting the audio and uploading it.)
A look at where the idea of “shades of grey” comes from—specifically, how it’s a logical consequence of consequentialism. There is a followup to Why Consequentialists See Only Shades of Grey. You can also watch it on YouTube:
In which I look at the story of a nerf gun used as a cognitive behavioral therapy tool, and an interesting issue mentioned in the story. (I have a previous post about this with some of the story as text.) You can also view this on YouTube:
“Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.’
Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval.
But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.’” –Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I recently explained hell to my nine year old son in a way that presented the adult version rather than the kid’s cartoon-book version and he understood it, so I’m relating that explanation here because it might be of interest.
A friend, acting out of morbid curiosity, watched a video by Bionic Dance that responded to my video, Life Doesn’t Have the Meaning You Give it, and alerted to me to it having some questions in it which might be interesting to answer. So I watched the video myself, wrote down the interesting questions, and answered them in this video.
I didn’t make a response video to her because—as I said in my video on why I’m not going to respond to her again—she contradicts herself so often that no response is needed; one only needs watch the entirety of her video (and remember what she said in the earlier parts) to see her refute herself. However, I will answer questions which I think can be generally useful regardless of where they came from, and these happened to be fairly well phrased for general use.
I talk about why the book How To Win Friends And Influence People is a good book. I highly recommend it. You can also watch this on YouTube if you prefer:
On the internet one will run across many atheists who are speaking in bad faith. I give a technique for how to tell whether any given atheist is speaking in good faith or in bad faith. Or you can view it on YouTube, if you like: